Budapest, Hungary

July 2

We arrived in Budapest around noon, greeted by the incredible heat.

Our hotel was in city center area, great location. I asked the hotel reception where I could go for some sightseeing, and the guy's English reminds me of Levente, my Hungarian friend from college:) Dress rehearsal wouldn't start until 5pm, but the bus would leave the hotel at 3, so I decided to leave the group and go see around with two of my friends, Ma and Jennifer. Hopefully we could find the concert hall in time for rehearsal. Following will be the craziness in the next 12 hours.

There's a small mountain called Paranoma blah??? (please help me out Tamas! alone with the name of the bridge that leads to it, please) where you can see the view of the whole city, 10 minutes walking distance from my hotel. on the bottom of the small hill there's a church in a cave, very unique. Compare to the hot weather, inside of the church is heaven. We started climbing the hill, oh yes we found a short cut where there were not that many people. Half way through I was already tired from traveling around, so kinda slowed down. Ma was ahead of me. When she was nowhere to be seen but still urging me to hurry up, I was puzzled. When I went passed a turn, I realized why... A naked guy was standing right there, touching himself and showing us his thing... so me and Jennifer ran away like crazy ducks...

Anyhow, we finally went up to the top, and the view was truely amazing:)

the church in the cave

We returned to the hotel and got our instruments, time to head to the concert hall.

It took us a while to find the subway and figure out how to buy the tickets. Hungarian is not like Polish, which at least I was able to guess a little bit. Hungarian is THE most insane language in the world, no such thing like "one of", and not that many Hungarians speak English on the street. So at the ticket machine, we ended up all buying the cheapest tickets cuz we understood nothing. After having bought the tickets, we found the English flag on the machine...epic fail. Anyways, we bought the right tickets.

Time passed by but we were not able to figure out the directions in the subway, even though I was holding the map and the reception guy wrote down the station names for me. I got so nervous already because it was only 20 minutes away from the rehearsal. At that time, a hero came... a guy asked us if we needed any help, IN ENGLISH! Thank god. He said he was going to the same direction, so we could just follow him. So we went on the train, it was the opposite direction from which we thought was right. I told our life saver that we just got there from Krakow, he asked me if that was the capital city of Poland~!@#$% anyhow, we got off the train, he was nice enough to walk us to the concert hall, the Palace of Art. It was such a big hall that we had to run here and there to find the back stage. By the time we found the stage, we saw the conductor's car just stopped...We ran to the stage, thank GOD that we arrived one minute before rehearsal started.

I've been looking for a new viola, and I heard eastern european instruments are cheaper than German ones. Through a friend I contact a violin maker in Budapest, and he brought two violas for me that day. He was so nice enough to let me take the violas to backstage without writing anything down. I tried them during break and played the one I liked for Mahler Symphonie No.1. It was a little too big for me, but it was incredibly nice to try out some instrument during the short stay.

By the time we got back to the hotel after the concert, it was already 10:30pm, and we were leaving in the next morning at 8. BUT THIS IS BUDAPEST, we can't leave the beautiful city just like that! so here comes the next adventure...

I, together with other 7, took the subway up to the Parlament house. It was so beautiful, well, I suppose...because we couldn't see much at night. The river view was stoning. Across the river there were castles all over, I wanted to spend a whole night just sit there and do nothing. Maybe some beer would be great.

From there, we walked alone the river, to the south. Passed a famous bridge (again forgot the name, help me!) which was the intersession to the east side of the city. It was 12am already and those Korean girls in the group decided to go back. We kept walking, hero square was our next destiny.

the bridge I was talking about

We stopped so much just to take pictures. It was pretty pointless but I had a picture in front of the opera house, in which Mahler was the manager. Anyhow, by 1 am we were still not any close to hero square, and there's nobody to ask around. We decided to get Kebab and ice cream, then go back. At the ice cream shop, the owner speaks German, that made our life tons easier already. He told us it was not far, maybe another half hour walk. You cannot imagine how tired we were by then. So much non-stop traveling and concerts and now this crazy walk...so we asked him how much the taxi would cost. He told us a trick: only get government-owned taxis, but not private ones, cuz those private taxis smug tourrists. He also told us the difference: government-owned taxis always have a sequent phone number, like 4444, outside the car (I cant remember clearly...) At that time, a guy with a bottle of beer came up to us and asked if we needed help, IN ENGLISH! It turned out that he was going to the same direction as we were, so he could walk with us for a little bit. Then a gang of Asian kids walking at 2 am on the street, with a Hungarian guy holding a beer. How funny is that.

So we finally arrived at hero square. Jennifer suddenly said, oh I've been here three years ago...no words... I couldn't see anything there, true story. Then we took a taxi back to the hotel. and that was it...

We got back at 3 am, People at the hotel were speechless when we told them we went to hero square at this late.

I have to go back to Budapest in some other time. This trip doesn't count.

next stop Prague. Wait for it...